The Corporate Performance Management Practitioner

According to MSNBC, there is a “quiet revolution” occurring in the American Workplace…Gartner is predicting that 27.5% of the workforce will “telework”, which seems to be defined a working at least 8 hours per week away from the office.  That seems low to me…. I suspect that most “telework” is really communication orientated…returning phone calls, checking email, etc. It stands to reason that as “telework” becomes more common, CPM processes will need to change.   What will the implications of a remote workforce mean for CPM? From a technical standpoint, the importance of BI on wireless devices will increase. When I worked for Brio (now Oracle via the Hyperion merger) we demoed Brio content on the Palm platform. Cognos has Version 8 on the Blackberry.  As I always try to point out, CPM is not just about the technology. There are many process concerns as well.   

• I suspect information provenance will be much more important. Without direct human contact, it will be more necessary to understand where a particular report comes from. What is the audit trail behind this data? 
   

• Maintaining a corporate culture is more difficult with a remote workforce. The importance of Alignment, both tactical and strategic will become more important. 
   

• For CPM processes that require collaboration (financial consolidation, financial planning, forecasting, budgeting, managerial reporting) will be more difficult in a remote environment. Many organizations struggle with these processes anyway, so this could be a real problem. It seems that this is a ripe area for new software development. 
   

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20281475/

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Most of the article has to do with the Walmart’s purchase of HP servers…but here is some interesting notes on just how big the Walmart Data Warehouse is. 

When the world’s largest retailer struggles with a database issue, the numbers can be a bit daunting. Wal-Mart’s data warehouse, for example, is larger than four petabytes. That’s more than 4,096TB, give or take a few million bits. The chain has more than 6,000 stores, with some having almost a half-million SKUs each. You think your Excel spreadsheets are bad? Wal-Mart’s database tables have literally 100 billion rows. The retailer’s POS systems have to ring up some 276 million items, a day.

The 276 million items per day (approximately 1 per every resident of the US) really is amazing.

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According to Global Knowledge, Business Intelligence skills are very much in demand right now. Specifically, they call out Cognos, Business Objects and Hyperion, but the expert makes special reference to the importance of functional skills as well as technical ones. Hmmm…Sounds kinda like what I call the CPM Practitioner! 

 ”Clients are making significant investments in business intelligence,” Ebner says. “But they don’t need pure technicians creating scripts and queries. To be a skilled data miner, you need hard-core functional knowledge of the business you’re trying to dissect.” People who can do both “are some of the hottest talent in the country right now,” he says.

Read the entire article here 

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Until recently, I personally had little experience with International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS). It is clear that US accountants and CPM practitioners are going to have to understand how the rest of the world measures corporate performance. We need to learn from the European experience.

European companies had to face a massive transitions from National GAAP to IFRS standards within 12 months….the transition went better than expected. The link below points to a very interesting PDF assembled by KPMG - United Kingdom regarding this process. When will the US change over?

http://www.kpmg.co.uk/pubs/307-535_IFRS.pdf

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I have nothing but respect for those bloggers who can keep posting every day, Month after month… After a very busy spring and summer, it is time for me to dedicate myself to keeping this blog updated.

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